The present invention generally relates to displaying information on a television interface and more particularly to techniques for displaying a user interface on a television that facilitates navigation of multimedia information displayed by the television.
The advent of appliances that are capable of displaying stored multimedia information via a television (TV) interface has dramatically changed a user's television viewing experience. Examples of such appliances include digital video recorders (DVRs), digital video disc (DVD) players, and the like. A DVR is a device that is capable of recording TV broadcasts for replay at a later time. During playback of the recorded TV broadcast, the user can pause, fast forward, rewind, or perform other operations on the recorded TV broadcast information similar to operations that can be performed by a video cassette recorder (VCR) system.
A DVR is generally a data processing system that includes a storage subsystem (e.g., a hard drive) for storing recorded TV broadcasts. The DVR is capable of recording one or more TV broadcasts during time intervals that may be specified by the user. DVRs generally also provide a user interface for navigating and controlling playback of the recorded TV broadcast information. The user interface is designed to be controlled with a TV remote control device.
Various user interfaces have been designed that are displayed on a TV and enable a user to control and navigate the playback of recorded multimedia information (which may include recorded TV broadcast information) that is output via the TV. In one example, a television interface includes a time bar that is displayed alongside the multimedia information that is being replayed by the TV. The time bar indicates the total length of the multimedia recording and the time elapsed during playback of the multimedia information. Markers are also included on the bar representing time points in the multimedia information to which a user can “jump”. A user may use a remote control to “jump” to the time points in the video corresponding to the markers. In conventional interfaces, the markers simply represent precon-figured time points in the multimedia information and are not determined with reference to the content of the recorded multimedia information. For example, the markers may correspond to the one-quarter, one-half, and three-quarters time intervals in the multimedia information. Also, these markers are not user configurable and do not show the content of the multimedia information. Further, the markers are displayed just as lines on the time bar and do not show any information related to the contents of the multimedia information. Additionally, navigation through the recorded multimedia information is restricted to the predefined markers—the time bar does not allow random access to sections of the recorded multimedia information that do not correspond to the markers.
A digital video disc (DVD) player generally allows a user to control playback and navigation of multimedia information stored on a DVD using predefined scenes. The user is presented a screen with a selection of scenes that include a picture associated with the scene. The user can select a scene to begin playback and the DVD begins playback of the multimedia information starting from the selected scene. The scene selection screen is not shown during the playback of the multimedia information. Thus, the DVD interface does not allow interactive navigation during playback of the multimedia information stored on a DVD. Once a user selects a scene, the multimedia information corresponding to the selected scene is played back on the TV. During playback, the user is not allowed to view the scene selection screen and navigate to other sections of the multimedia information. Further, the user is limited to navigating between the predefined scenes.